Concepts and subject matter discussed in the background section is not to be taken as prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
Many customers have need of a wide range of translation services, such as, for example, developing a website or marketing-related emails in a source language into one or more other target languages. In the simple case, a customer has a document with source text in a first language and desires that it be translated into one or more other languages. Conventionally, the customer contracts with a translation vendor who, directly or indirectly, retains qualified translators to perform the translation(s). The customer receives the translated text and makes whatever use of it that the customer desires. Sometime later, the customer develops a second document to be translated from the first language into the one or more languages previously referenced. That second document may contain significant source text overlap with the previously translated material.
Without translation memory management, the customer may overpay for the resulting translation. Particularly if the customer uses a different translation vendor who performs a complete translation of all the new source text into the desired translation languages. There are some translation memory management tools designed for use by translation vendors which can assist the vendor when performing translations for a single customer. In the example of the second document, in the event that the customer has contracted with a translation vendor that uses a translation memory management tool, it is not always the case that the customer realizes the cost-saving of the tool. Thus there is a need for customer-centric on-demand translation memory management service so the customer can understand and control their translation costs.
Further, conventional localized translation memory management tools do not scale well for centralized on-demand translation memory management. It is common for the collective size of a customer's data in a translation memory to grow larger than physical memory of a computing system. Simple addition of computing resources is at best a temporary solution as the datastore size continues to grow to outsize cost-efficient mechanisms to store and process the data. Operating on the data would become impossible or become ineffective due to an amount of time required for queries, insertions, and other standard operations.
The nature of translation makes proliferation of copies of source and translated text common. These problems are at most inconveniences for local conventional translation memory management tools. Inclusion of duplicates in the datastore only hastens and compounds the problems of scalability for centralized on-demand translation memory management.
Conventional local translation memory management tools do not address issues of relevancy. Translation includes a guiding principle that a translation is of the message of a source text, and not just translation of component segments. A customer will have a first set of translation projects for one audience and a second set of translation projects for another audience. Understanding which content of the translation memory are relevant to the appropriate audiences improves the application of the translation memory management to cost-efficient translation, translation accuracy, and overall correctness of the translation. Managing the translation memory for relevancy across one or more variable dimensions was not necessary for local vendor tools.
Besides the straightforward benefits of providing a customer-centric model of translation memory management with the addition of relevancy in an on-demand multi-tenant environment, an additional benefit of centralized translation memory is that translations may be shared across customers. For customers opting-in, and for suitable non-private content, translation memory of one customer may be made available to other customers of the service, greatly improving the cost-effectiveness and usefulness of the centralized translation memory, particularly when the shared data is relevant and in a similar industry and/or has the same use.
What is needed is a customer-centric on-demand translation memory management service.